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Topic: Ecobee3 control from VeraEdge UI7 (Read 12165 times)

I have my Ecobee3 connected to my VeraEdge via the Ecobee plugin. I can see data from the Ecobee, but I can't seem to make any changes to the set points or system heat/off/cool settings. Whenever I try to use the ecobee in a scene, the settings show up, but are all faded/greyed out and can't be changed.

I'm trying to set it up so that the thermostat shuts off (or goes to significantly lower set point) when the front door has been open for ore than a 30 seconds. I think I've got everything else set up right, but the inability to change the actual settings has proven to be quite the road block!

I can reproduce your experience using the published Ecobee plugin on UI7 1.7.1018 on a VeraEdge. I can change the mode from Off to Heat (for example) from the UI, but not when trying to define a scene, as the choices are greyed out. The plugin does not have this issue on UI5, so I would say this is a UI7 bug that Vera ought to fix.

My only advice is to report this bug to Vera and hope they fix it. If they don't fix the bug in a reasonably short timeframe, there are other home automation products (including free and open source) that work with Ecobee that don't have this sort of issue.

Thanks, Watou. I'll let the support at micasaverde know about the bug.

Do you have recommendations for other home automation platforms that might be worth looking into?

It's hard to recommend one over the other without knowing a lot more about your objectives, but... Ecobee can be monitored and controlled with Vera, SmartThings, IFTTT, and OpenHAB (and maybe others). I'm personally interested in OpenHAB because it's free, open-source, very capable, runs on lots of different hardware, and is not a "black box" controlled by a private company. (I also wrote the Ecobee and Nest bindings for it.) That being said, it's a bit technical to set up in its current form and requires more computer knowledge to get going than pre-packaged commercial products.

I'm still hanging around, and hoping that someday the Vera developers get UI7 back to the point UI5 achieved, where a plugin author can make a thermostat plugin that works correctly (i.e., can respect the various setpoints of the actual device) and looks like the "native" thermostats (has the current temperature in the right place and other UI basics). I'm much in the same frame of mind as other plugin developers you've probably heard from in other threads. I worry about releasing plugin updates that only fix/improve the shrinking list of things I have control over, only to be critiqued that setpoints, scenes and UI features are still obviously broken. I continue to marvel at the state of UI7 with respect to plugins.

I hope to add support for remote sensors to the Ecobee plugin, but it's always disappointing to see the limits in UI7 that weren't there in UI5.

@tomgru: As long as you and other users don't disagree with the descriptions of these changes (at github), I don't see the need to have a beta test. I will probably feel ready to upload v1.2 later today, and then it will take the Vera people some time to review the changes.

@anhman and @NickTheGreat: The remote Ecobee sensors appear as standard motion and temperature sensors, so you ought to be able to automate with them. Please note that if your wireless remote sensor goes offline, the device will set CommFailure to 1 and CurrentTemperature to -500 (if using Fahrenheit, or equivalent in Celsius). Also, the motion sensors can take up to 3 minutes to trip (the new minimum polling cycle), and stay tripped until 30 minutes after last motion (according to Ecobee).